Lost in Suburbia: The devil wears pistachio

Tracy Beckerman More Content Now

Wednesday

Sep 11, 2019 at 10:00 AM

Every year around this time, I get inundated with emails telling me about the latest fall trends and what I should buy and what I should toss. Having been down this wardrobe rabbit hole before, I didn’t want to make a fall fashion faux-pas, such as I did last year, when one trendsetting site told me that the “it” shoe was a pointed witchy boot that was so tight it nearly made my pinky toes fall off.

So, this year I cross-referenced all the fashion sources to see what everyone agreed on.And the consensus was … pistachio.

The big fall color was pistachio.

As photos of pretty clothes in hideous shades of pistachio swam before my eyes, I wondered, who decides these things and, for goodness sake, why pistachio? Pistachio is not even a good color for a nut much less a woman over 50 with a fading summer tan.

Generally, I tend not to do well with clothing colors that are named for foods. I don’t look good in eggplant or cantaloupe or mustard, so I didn’t hold out much hope for pistachio. And really, calling a color pistachio doesn’t distract from the fact that it is basically just ugly green. It falls somewhere on the color wheel between hospital room-green and algae, neither of which are a particularly good shade for anyone. When your clothes give you the pallor of a dead person, you know it’s time to move on.

I was duly forewarned when I hit the stores after Labor Day, and even though I was expecting it, the site of all that pistachio-ness was still a shock. There were pistachio pants and pistachio coats and even little pistachio berets for the woman who wants some panache with her pistachio.

A woman with pistachio-painted fingernails breezed by on her way to the racks of pistachio-colored palazzo pants in plaid. It was all just a little bit excessive and made me long for the days of mustard and cantaloupe.

All around me, trendy women were scooping up the pistachio-colored clothing as though there was about to be a shortage of pistachios and they might be forced to settle for clothes in avocado instead. As I watched in awe, I decided it couldn’t hurt to try on one pistachio-colored coat just to see how awful it would actually look on me. I didn’t want to be one of those women who judged a trend without trying it, even if it did make me look like I’d just had food poisoning.

But as I reached for my size, another woman in a pistachio-induced shopping frenzy reached past me and whisked the coat off the rack and into her basket.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I was just about to try that on.”

“Just take another one,” she said dismissively.

“That was the last one in my size,” I replied.

“Forget it,” she replied. “I’m doing you a favor … this color would look terrible on you.”For more Lost in Suburbia, follow Tracy on Facebook at www.facebook.com/LostinSuburbiaFanPage and on Twitter at @TracyBeckerman.